GENOA SUMMIT MEETING: THE OVERVIEW

By DAVID E. SANGER and ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: July 22, 2001

GENOA, Italy, July 21—
As tens of thousands of demonstrators marched toward the center of this ancient city and occasionally clashed with the police, the United States' leading allies told President Bush today that they intended to move ahead and ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming by next year, even without American participation.

At the summit meeting of top industrial nations, protesters and riot police clashed anew, one day after a protester was killed. Today as many as 50,000 demonstrators flowed through the streets of Genoa, but outside the center of the city, where the leaders were sequestered.

The crowds were far larger than on Friday. The police made efforts to keep their distance, after images raced around the world on Friday of an Italian policeman shooting a demonstrator dead, and then running over his body with a jeep.

In the day's meeting agenda, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada said that his nation had the same position on the global warming treaty ''as Japan, as Europe, as Russia: we are ready to ratify.''

Other officials suggested that a round of telephone calls among the leaders of Japan, France and Germany this week had left Mr. Bush isolated on the issue.

Mr. Chrétien said negotiators would work overnight to come up with some common language about global warming for a communiqué to be issued Sunday.

But he added that negotiators in Bonn, where a meeting on the subject is under way, would work on details of how the Kyoto accord would be implemented. [Those negotiators moved a step closer to agreement on the final details. Page 14.] Without American participation, though, the treaty would be largely ineffective.

Mr. Chrétien said the Americans had agreed to come up with an alternative proposal to Kyoto, but the Americans said they had not promised a date for delivering that plan.

In the debate on global warming, Mr. Chrétien said Mr. Bush had promised to present an alternative to the specific restrictions of the Kyoto agreement by early fall, a proposal that would presumably sidestep the Kyoto accord's specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to levels Mr. Bush said would cripple the American economy.

Mr. Chrétien said he was still open to hearing the American proposal, but he was not waiting for it. ''They claim they will be ready,'' he told reporters this afternoon. ''I will see.''

As the leaders politely dealt with their disagreements, the global warming issue did not come up in meetings Mr. Bush held today with President Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany.

Twenty-four hours after the death of the protester, Mr. Bush spoke about it briefly today, saying, ''It's a tragic loss of life.'' But he insisted that protesters who ''claim to represent the voices of the poor aren't doing so. Those protesters who try to shut down our talks on trade and aid don't represent the poor, as far as I'm concerned.''

But while Mr. Bush insisted that the leaders should be undeterred by escalating protests at these summit meetings, President Jacques Chirac of France, sitting next to him, offered a different view. ''Obviously, we have all been traumatized by the events,'' he said.

Mr. Chirac, referring to the protests, said: ''The elected leaders of our countries have to consider the problems that have brought tens of thousands of our compatriots, mainly from European countries, to demonstrate their concern, to demonstrate their wish to change.''

As sporadic scuffles with the police continued into the evening, Mr. Bush and his fellow leaders dined by the port of this ancient city, in an ornate, early 19th-century boat terminal that has been restored, along with much of this city. Even that imagery worried some leaders, who knew that the television images of their toasts would be intermingled with the scenes of rock throwing and tear gassing a mile away.

''We have to find another way,'' a senior Japanese diplomat said late today. ''This is no way to hold a real discussion.''

The police, bedecked in an array of riot dress and armed with tear gas and more lethal weaponry, tried to take a lower profile on the streets today as they struggled to contain the largest crowds yet. They were absent entirely from the site of the shooting of the protester, even when a group of young anarchists attacked a Japanese television journalist.

The protesters who turned out on the broad boulevards here were composed of young veterans of the Friday clashes, some with bandaged wounds, union members, smartly dressed groups of citizens from towns all over Europe bearing banners with anti-capitalist slogans in different languages, and black-clad anarchists. Many of the self-described ''Black Bloc'' wore motorcycle helmets and waved lengths of lumber as truncheons.

The tension ran high between moderate groups who saw the gathering here of leaders from the leading industrial nations as a chance to protest against disparities between the rich and poor, and the anarchists who wanted to act out their rage after the shooting death of one of their supporters.